Talk:Great Hall
Wasn't this thing supposed to have been too grandiose to stand for real? Turtle Fan 05:30, January 14, 2010 (UTC) :I guess various architects sent Speer ideas about problems and solutions while he was in prison. There seems to be a consensus that if built on his specifications after he was released, it would have worked ok. TR 06:08, January 14, 2010 (UTC) ::Oh? That's nice, I guess. I had always heard it would have collapsed under its own weight. :::One problem Speer never seemed to work out was the possibility of indoor precipitation. The sheer number of people breathing in cold weather might have caused rain. ::::In Robert Harris's Fatherland--which does a far more thorough job of painting life in a world ruled by Nazis than ItPoME does, but despite this richer setting tells an even less original story--the tour guides use that as a selling point: "This building has its own weather! Isn't that impressive?" Turtle Fan 16:57, January 14, 2010 (UTC) :::::It's been a while since I read that. I do remember finding Harris's depiction richer, but somehow ItPoME was overall more interesting. ::::::My memories of Fatherland include arguing with Gizzi about its quality (He told me I was "not a true AH fan" because I didn't find it exciting even though it's among the most commercially successful AH works, or as I like to call it, argumentum ad populum); growing tired of its slow pace, looking up spoilers online, learning the mystery to which it built was that the Nazis had been running a genocide, and giving up on it halfway through out of disgust that it used such a long, slow, tedious buildup just to expose the first thing most people associate with the Nazis; going back to it months later as part of some sort of paper on dystopias in film, reading the rest of it, watching the screen adaptation, and deciding that the latter was far more interesting. ::::::But I agree with your assessment, the setting was richer than ItPoME but the story was duller. Which is not easy to do, since ItPoME is nothing but David Remnick's Lenin's Tomb rewritten as a Mad Lib. Turtle Fan 19:27, January 14, 2010 (UTC) :::::I have wondered in the past how much of ItPoME was a "response" to Fatherland. Odilo Globocnik was the central villain in Fatherland, and look how some guy with the same name turned out in ItPoME. TR 17:07, January 14, 2010 (UTC) Hmm--Perhaps. Of course ItPoME came out some time after the fuss over Fatherland had quieted down. The novel, anyway. The short story preceded Harris, I believe. HT may have found some inspiration in Fatherland--given both its believability and its commercial success, it's one of the more obvious places to look for something like that. Turtle Fan 19:27, January 14, 2010 (UTC) :::Also, the acousitics probably would have sucked. TR 15:58, January 14, 2010 (UTC) ::::Oh, sure. I can't imagine it any other way. And I imagine they'd have had periodic scandals where someone whispered something in private and it was amplified by some acoustic quirk. In our politics such scandals are tiresome; in totalitarianism, deadly dangerous. Turtle Fan 16:57, January 14, 2010 (UTC) You know, Mao called his super-auditorium the Great Hall of the People. It's only 45 meters high, but is length and width are in the ballpark of Speer's. I wonder if he took inspiration from Hitler. Turtle Fan 16:57, January 14, 2010 (UTC) :::Maybe, but its fairly common for absolute rulers to build monuments of this sort to themselves. ML4E 20:18, January 15, 2010 (UTC) :A great defender of the People taking inspiration from a fashist? Perish the thought. TR 17:07, January 14, 2010 (UTC) ::Well I don't know about in Mao's era but according to Peter Hessler, by the 90s the Chinese had come to see Hitler as the strong, no-nonsense nationalist and populist he had always painted himself as, who just overextended himself and let his racism go a bit overboard--about the most generous assessment you can make of Hitler without turning into a fanboy of his yourself. In China they think of WWII primarily if not exclusively as the Second Sino-Japanese War, of course, and the Nazis didn't have much to do with that aside from sending SS goons to Shanghai to beg the Japanese to turn over the large Jewish refugee enclave to them. The Japanese rolled their eyes and told the SS to fuck off. Also there's Berlin's role in mitigating the Rape of Nanking, though that had a lot more to do with the heroism of John Rabe pretending to be acting in an official capacity. ::Anyway, the name is certainly similar, and "Great Hall of the People" doesn't really resemble many indigenously Chinese phrases I can think of. Turtle Fan 19:27, January 14, 2010 (UTC) Looks like the article is duplicated (The Great Hall).WastedTime 09:59, May 11, 2011 (UTC) :Thanks. TR 16:28, May 11, 2011 (UTC)